Web Services Reliability Specification Published

January 9, 2003 - A group of leading IT vendors, consisting of Fujitsu
Limited, Hitachi, Ltd., NEC Corp, Oracle Corp., Sonic Software, and Sun
Microsystems, today announced the publication of the Web Services
Reliability (WS-Reliability) specification working draft (see links below).
By providing a fundamentally more reliable transport infrastructure,
WS-Reliability will help accelerate adoption of Web services, making them
relevant for an even wider range of enterprise application and integration
challenges.

WS-Reliability is a specification for open, reliable Web services
messaging-including guaranteed delivery, duplicate message elimination and
message ordering*enabling reliable communication between Web services. The
reliability features are based on extensions to the Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP), rather than being tied to the underlying transport
protocol. The specification will allow a variety of systems to interoperate
reliably in a platform- and vendor-neutral manner. Following collaboration
on the specification draft, the companies plan to submit WS-Reliability to a
standards body on a royalty-free basis.

The WS-Reliability specification working draft is available royalty free for
download from each co-editor's Web site: